br Mosques spreading throughout America. http://www.israelvideonetwork.+++
Apparently Obama made a deal with Australia that America would take Muslim refugees Australia did not want and would allow Australia to take some Latin American refugees we had agreed to so, while he seeks to be tough, Trump finds himself hamstrung by Obama's actions. However, Trump has agreed to honor the deal he said he would not have made. (See 1 below.)
Trump's frankness may not be diplomatic but it leaves little doubt, for those on the other, end where he stands. I believe Trump is refreshing because he is not a politician, he is a businessman and they do not think or speak in the same manner.
Even Trump's humor is a mixture of playful, direct, biting and, at times, even vulgar..
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The stolen seat claim is another ploy on the part of recalcitrant Democrats to justify their pettiness.
Meanwhile, Democrats are suffering from tactics Reid employed and they are going ballistic. They never thought Reid's actions would boomerang.
Be careful what you wish for because you may have to eat the same "knuckle sandwich" down the road. (See 2 below.)
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I cannot wait. (See 3 below.)
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More comment on Trump's "ban" garbage. (See 4 below.)
Dick
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1)
German and EU taxpayers will pay nearly $46,000,000,000 to deal with problems caused by Muslim migrants
ANGELA Merkel’s failed migrant policy will cost Germany and the EU a record £37bn by the end of 2017, it has been revealed.
It is fair to state that many citizens of Germany and the EU do not have a high disposable income, and cannot afford adequate dental and medical care or prescriptions for their families; yet Angela Merkel and her leftist bureaucratic colleagues clearly do not care about their well-being. The elites’ failing of the public economically was only one aspect of the migrant chaos; the citizenry has also been exposed to crime surges, sex assaults, and jihadist attacks, as well as threats of much more to come. Stemming the influx of Muslim refugees has nothing to do with lack of compassion for their suffering, contrary to leftist leaders’ adamant claims; it has everything to do with homeland security and stability.
“The cost of Merkel’s refugee crisis: Germany to spend £37BN to fix migrant chaos”, by Siobhan McFadyen, Express, January 31, 2017:
+++++++++++++++++++++++ANGELA Merkel’s failed migrant policy will cost Germany and the EU a record £37bn by the end of 2017, it has been revealed.And the Chancellor’s struggling administration has unveiled a raft of new laws in parliament to help cope with the escalating European migrant crisis.A report for The Federal Ministry of Finance revealed taxpayers will be spending £37bn (€43bn) for 2016 and 2017 migrant budget to “meet the challenges of the nation-state”.The asylum and refugee policy from the federal budget perspective report said it was necessary to put Germany “on a good path”.Bundestag politicians have instigated an ‘Asylum Procedures Acceleration Act’ in a bid to speed up the process of deportation.The German parliament has banned family reunion for two years, meaning battles to bring relatives of migrants over to Germany, as currently happens in Britain, will no longer take place.And they have introduced a new law to allow for the easier expulsion of offenders in the case of asylum seekers suspected of committing a criminal offence.Mrs Merkel’s Government says this law will allow them to identify “strange behaviour of foreigners” that could put them at risk of expulsion.And they are set to digitise their immigration protocols as they implement an ‘introduction of proof of arrival’ scheme to identify those who have no paperwork.The Federal Ministry of Finance will also sanction payments for an integration package of £1.72bn (€2bn) annually from 2016 to 2018…..
Democrats set the standard for the GOP on judicial confirmations.
The confirmation battle over Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch is off and running, and opponents already know he’s superbly qualified with a fine judicial temperament. But Democrats are still itching for a fight, and their first line of offense is the myth of the “stolen” seat.
“This is a seat that was stolen from the former President, Obama, that’s never been done in U.S. history before,” declared Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley in announcing that he will attempt to filibuster Judge Gorsuch. “To let this become normal just invites a complete partisan polarization of the Court from here to eternity.” The “stolen” line is echoing across Progressive Nation, but it’s a complete political invention.
The “theft” is supposedly the GOP Senate’s refusal last year to vote on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat. But the standard of not confirming a Supreme Court nominee in the final year of a Presidency was set by . . . Democrats. And by no less a Beltway monument than the current Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer.
“We should not confirm any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court, except in extraordinary circumstances,” Mr. Schumer declared in a July 2007 speech to the American Constitution Society. Democrats then held the Senate and Mr. Schumer was putting down a marker if someone on the High Court retired. George W. Bush didn’t get another opening, but Mr. Schumer surely meant what he said.
The Democratic theft standard goes back further to Joe Biden’s days as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In June 1992 in President George H.W. Bush’s final year, Robber Joe opined that the President “should consider following the practice of a majority of his predecessors and not name a nominee until after the November election is completed.”
Naming a new Justice, he said, would ensure that a confirmation “process that is already in doubt in the minds of many will become distrusted by all.” If Mr. Bush made an election-year nomination, Mr. Biden said his committee should consider “not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination until after the political campaign season is over.”
Does anyone outside the MSNBC audience think that had the roles been reversed in 2016, and a Democratic Senate faced a Republican Court nominee, Harry Reid would have held a confirmation vote? As John McEnroe liked to shout, “You can’t be serious!”
The “stolen” myth is being used to justify a filibuster that could block Judge Gorsuch’s confirmation with as few as 41 votes. Mr. Schumer said Tuesday that “the Senate must insist upon 60 votes for any Supreme Court nominee, a bar that was met by each of President Obama’s nominees.”
There he goes again. Republicans never invoked the trigger for a filibuster known as “cloture” against either Sonia Sotomayor, who was confirmed 68-31 in 2009, or Elena Kagan, who was confirmed 63-37 in 2010. Republicans also helped to whoop through Bill Clinton nominees Ruth Bader Ginsburg 96-3 and Stephen Breyer 87-9.
The only recent attempt at filibustering a Supreme Court nominee was by Democrats against George W. Bush nominee Samuel Alito in 2006. Twenty-five Democrats filed for cloture, led by then Senator Obama, Hillary Clinton and Mr. Schumer. They lost that vote, but sometimes we fear that Senator Schumer’s memory may be fading since he can’t seem to recall his previous actions.
As for filibustering Judge Gorsuch, several Democrats up for re-election are saying they don’t want to do it. And Republicans shouldn’t invite a filibuster, notwithstanding President Trump’s comments Wednesday that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should change Senate rules to break a filibuster if he has to. If we’re certain about anything in politics it is that Mr. McConnell doesn’t need Donald Trump’s advice about running the Senate. The Majority Leader has more guile than Mr. Trump has bluster, and he knows it’s better politics to confirm the judge without breaking Senate rules.
But if forced to do so, Mr. McConnell can also invoke a Democratic precedent. Mr. Reid broke the filibuster to pack Mr. Obama’s nominees on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and last year he said Democrats would do the same for the Supreme Court if Mrs. Clinton won the election and his party held the Senate. “I have set the Senate so when I leave, we’re going to be able to get judges done with a majority,” he said. “They mess with the Supreme Court, it’ll be changed just like that in my opinion.”
Losing vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine promised the same last October. “If these guys think they’re going to stonewall the filling of that vacancy or other vacancies,” Mr. Kaine said, a Democratic majority “will change the Senate rules to uphold the law.”
Judge Gorsuch is such a distinguished nominee that he ought to be confirmed 100-0, but if Democrats try and fail to defeat him, the world should know that they are the authors of their own political frustration.
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3) Trump Prepares U.N. Takedown
President Trump is reportedly preparing an executive order that will significantly reduce U.S. involvement in the United Nations.
The draft order, “Auditing and Reducing U.S. Funding of International Organizations,” would terminate funding completely for any international organization that meets one or more of several criteria.
The U.S. currently provides roughly a quarter of all funding to U.N. peacekeeping missions and funds a full fifth of the body’s general budget alone.
The criteria include those that recognize the Palestinian Authority or PLO, fund abortion, or work to circumvent sanctions against Iran or North Korea. The order also calls for “at least a 40 percent overall decrease” in funding to international groups overall.
The order would also create a committee tasked with identifying where cuts can be made, The New York Times reported. The committee would take a closer look at the International Criminal Court, peacekeeping missions, the UN Population Fund, and developmental aid to countries that oppose U.S. policy.
A 40-percent decrease overall in U.S. funding towards the U.N. and other international organizations would save American taxpayers a significant amount of money.
The U.S. currently provides roughly a quarter of all funding to U.N. peacekeeping missions and funds a full fifth of the body’s general budget alone. Including other mandatory and voluntary expenditures, U.S. taxpayers send roughly $8 billion to the international organization each year.
And while the internationalist ideologue will insist that the U.S. is merely fulfilling its international moral obligations, such an assertion assumes the U.N. and its peacekeepers are actually doing their jobs.
A 2014 study of U.N. peacekeeping operations with a mandate to protect civilians — conducted by the U.N. itself — discovered that U.N. troops “did not report responding to 406 (80 percent) of [the 570] incidents where civilians were attacked.”
The 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti which killed more than 8,000 people was traced to U.N. peacekeepers, and U.N. staff members have been accused of sexual exploitation, rape, and abuse in at least 10 countries in Europe, Africa, and the West Indies.
A 2012 study by researchers at NYU and Mississippi State University of the best and worst aid agency practices found that the U.N. had some of the very worst. “The biggest difference is between the UN agencies, who mostly rank in the bottom half of donors, and everyone else,” the report noted.
Meanwhile, the U.N. bureaucrats who are supposed to make sure things like that don’t happen get benefits and salaries nearly a third higher than their U.S. civil servant counterparts.
In addition to being a drain on America’s treasury, our extravagant commitments to the U.N. often undermine the nation’s moral credibility.
Rampant accusations of fraud, mismanagement, corruption, and sexual assault aside, the U.N. is the organization charged ostensibly with protecting world peace and human rights that counts China, Cuba, Burundi, Egypt, Iraq, Venezuela, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia among the members of its Human Rights Council.
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4) Fake News, Failed States, and 'America First'
One would have thought that a 90-day suspension of immigration from seven countries with minimal economic ties to the United States would be minor news. It has to be the best thing an American president has done since Ronald Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, because all the people I dislike have gone bat-guano crazy.
The mainstream press is blaming Trump for everything including a down day on the stock market. This is how Bloomberg News began its lead stock market story today: "U.S. stocks fell the most since the presidential election, while Treasuries advanced with gold as Donald Trump’s order on immigration raised concern that he may follow through with isolationist policies touted on the campaign trail, overshadowing a pro-growth agenda." Now, that is perhaps the silliest piece of financial commentary that I have read in half a century of market-watching. What do immigrants from Syria and and Somalia have to do with the U.S. stock market? If the idea weren't idiotic on the face of it, one might point out that the Mexican peso--the shaky currency of the one country subject to protectionist threats from Washington during the past week--rose today while the U.S. stock market fell. In fact, the Mexico peso has risen almost 4% during the past week. If the market is worried about Trump's supposed isolationism, why is the country most affected doing better?
Then we have Starbucks, Lyft, and the whole Silicon Valley circus denouncing Trump for cutting off their labor supply--as if they employed Somalis or Yemenis.
It's just fake news, folks. Fake news has metastasized from the gossip columns (vicious personal attacks against Trump family members) to the political columns (scurrilous slanders against Trump team members like Gen. Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon) to the financial page. I'm waiting for the mainstream media to blend fake news into the weather report ("Tornadoes struck the Midwest today in response to President Trump's failure to address global warming," or something like that).
The biggest piece of fake news is that Trump is isolationist. It's true that the catchphrase "America First" originated with isolationists. In the 1930s, Charles Lindbergh's "America First" movement opposed intervention against the Nazis. De facto it was an instrument of German foreign policy.
By sharp contrast, President Trump has promised to "eradicate" the contemporary equivalent of Nazism, namely radical Islam terrorism. That means to eradicate it anywhere in the world. It's the polar opposite of Lindbergh's isolationism: It means that America is going use all of its power all over the world to stamp out the present-day version of Nazism. Radical Islam is a lineal descendant of Nazism. See Paul Berman's book The Flight of the Intellectuals for documentation of the common history of Nazism and modern Islamism.That isn't isolationism. It's an activist foreign policy. It happens to be the kind of activism that the Democratic Party and the McCain wing of the Republican Party don't like. What Trump means by America First is that America will not sacrifice the blood of its soldiers and the security of its citizens in a Utopian quest to save other countries and cultures who, sadly, insist on destroying themselves. Instead, we will insulate ourselves from their failure and take measures to protect ourselves from their hatred and rage against us.
The Muslim world is full of failed and soon-to-be-failed states that no force on earth will save from self-destruction. In my 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too), I argued that Muslim society goes from infancy to senescence without passing through adulthood. As soon as Muslim countries achieve adult female literacy, the bonds of traditional society dissolve and post-modern pathologies replace pre-modern constraints. Iran is the poster-child for civilizational failure. Iranian women had seven children in 1979 and have just 1.7 children today, which means that Iran will be the first country to get old before it gets rich. By 2040 it will have an elderly dependent ratio like Europe's with a tenth the per capita income, and that is a social death sentence.
A quarter of Iran's married couples claim to be infertile, the highest rate in the world, probably because between 12% and 21% of Iranian women are infected with venereal disease, as I have reported previously. That is the case because Iran's mullahs make most of their income by pimping, that is, signing "temporary marriage" certificates. Iran is the most dissolute and depraved society in modern history, and its demographic collapse is already baked in the cake. Little wonder that its ruling mullahs look at the world through an apocalyptic lens.
In a March 13, 2016, essay for Asia Times, I compared the present war-without-end in the Middle East to previous wars of long-term attrition--the Peloponnesian War, the Thirty Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, the First and Second World Wars--and noted a consistent pattern: such wars continue until the available military manpower is exhausted, usually when 30% of military-age men have been killed. Arguably America's intervention in the region set in motion what I once called General Petraeus' Thirty Years' War, but our mistakes were well-intentioned responses to the region's underlying instability in the first place.We can't send in American soldiers to fix these countries. We can't import their problems by admitting a horde of refugees who bring with them the pathologies that ruined these countries in the first place. We have to draw a bright line between the United States of America and the failed states of the Middle East. There are lots of little things wrong with the refugee ban but one very big thing right about it: It sends the message that we will not prejudice American interests in a Quixotic effort to fix the unfixable problems of other peoples.
President Trump has offended the core belief of modern liberalism, the notion that we have both the capacity and responsibility to fix all the world's problems. Instead of sin and punishment we have therapy, social work, and foreign aid.Something went sour in American public life a century ago when mainline Protestantism embraced Walter Rauschenbusch's "Social Gospel" and Woodrow Wilson declared that it was America's responsibility to make the world safe for democracy. Rather than the exceptionalism of the Puritan founders and Abraham Lincoln, who saw Americans as an "almost chosen people" set apart from the Old World, Wilsonian liberalism styled the elite as little gods on earth whose job it was to remake the world in our image. Sadly, a red thread connects Wilson with George W. Bush's failed Freedom Agenda.
Most Americans have had enough of this. We elected Donald Trump to protect us. His promise to halt Muslim immigration was the turning point in his campaign fortunes, and rightly so. To declare that we will no longer bear the burdens of failed states, though, is to tell the elite that they are not an elite at all--they simply are unemployed. And it tells liberals that their secular path to salvation is shut down for the duration.
"I haven't had so much fun since the hogs ate my kid brother," said Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op. Watching the liberals squeak and gibber is a treat. Enjoy the show, and don't believe what you read in the papers
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